Page 1 of 3
When solution provider Denali Advanced Integration helped prepare and deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure based on Cisco UCS for Seattle Children's Hospital, it depended as much on its ability to monitor doctors' daily workflow as it did its top-notch server and networking skills.
Indeed, a key part of the implementation was the assigning of a Denali expert on medical workflows to follow doctors and other staff on a daily basis in order to make sure users of the new virtual desktop system saw little or no change in their daily routine.
Seattle Children's in late 2009 decided to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure to enable its medical practitioners to move from one patient workstation to another without the need to boot up a PC and without worrying that patient data might be accidentally accessed by the wrong people.
The key factor behind the move to virtual desktops was the need to make it faster for doctors and other personnel to access patient information and related data, said Wes Wright, vice president and CTO at Seattle Children's.
"With the iPad, people have gotten used to instant-on," Wright said. "You can't get that with a PC no matter what you try. It takes four minutes to boot a PC up. But with VDI, we found we could go from turning on the device to doing work in 43 seconds."
Because medical personnel see so many patients, Seattle Children's medical staff move from device to device over 100,000 times a month, Wright said. "They moving from station to station, turning their devices on and off," he said. "Every minute, every second we could save our users impacts our costs."
Jake Hughes, chief technical architect at Seattle Children's, said in a worst-case scenario, a user might need to spend seven to ten minutes per patient dealing with IT.
"That includes waiting to log in, enter a password, and waiting for the apps," Hughes said. "That's out of a total of 20 minutes spent with a patient. It's pretty compelling when up to half the time spent with a patient is spent waiting for IT. And after Patch Tuesday, it can take about 12 minutes to turn a system on."
Hughes said Seattle Children's looked at both Citrix and VMware for virtual desktop technology, but decided on Citrix because of a long history of working with that company's XenApp application virtualization technology. Citrix also sweetened the deal by offering two free XenDesktop licenses for every XenApp license the organization had, he said.
In early 2010, once the decision had been made to use Citrix's XenDesktop, Seattle Children's starting doing a proof of concept on its existing Hewlett Packard c-Class server blade infrastructure. However, Hughes said, as the number of virtual desktops scaled, users noticed their performance slowing down.
Seattle Children's had looked at Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) in 2009, but decided to give that vendor a chance in the Summer of 2010 when Cisco offered a "Try and Buy" program, Hughes said. "We saw no degradation in user experience," he said. "That, combined with the cost, sold us on Cisco UCS."
What also sold Seattle Children's on UCS was Denali which, in partnership with Cisco, was able to deploy Citrix XenDesktop on UCS in less than a week, Hughes said.
Next: Stalking The Doctors To Model Their IT Use
